Informatica just announced their Big Data Management solution V10, the latest update to their flagship suite of technology. The key objective for this is to enable customers to design data architectures that can accommodate both traditional database sources and newer Big Data “lakes” without needing to get swim too deeply in the world of MapReduce or Spark.
In particular, the Live Data Map offering is interesting, a tool that builds a metadata catalog as automatically as it can. Crucially, this is updated continuously rather than being a one-off batch exercise, the bane of previous metadata efforts, which can quickly get out of date. It analyses not just database system tables but also semantics and usage, so promises to chart a path through the complexity of today’s data management landscape without need for whiteboards and data model diagrams.
V10 extends the company’s already fairly comprehensive ability to plug into a wide range of data sources, with over 100 pre-built transformations and over 200 connectors. By providing a layer of interface above the systems management level, a customer can gain a level of insulation from the rapidly changing world of Big Data, with its bewildering menagerie of technologies, some of which disappear from current fashion almost as soon as you have figured out where they fit. Presenting a common interface across traditional and new data sources enables organisations to minimise wasted skills investment.
As well as quite new features such as Live Data Map, there are an array of incremental updates to the established technology elements of the Informatica suite, such as improved collaboration capability within the data quality suite, and the ability of the data integration hub to span both cloud and on-premise data flows. A major emphasis of the latest release is performance improvement, with much faster data import and data cleansing.
With Informatica having recently gone private, it will be comforting for their customers that the company is investing as much as ever in its core technology, as well as adding new and potentially very useful new elements. The data management landscape is increasingly fragmented and complex these days, so hard pressed data architects need all the help that they can get.